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Terminal Tokyo app
Oct. 9th, 2013 02:33 pmOOC Information
NAME: Endless
AGE: 23
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: N/A
IC Information
CHARACTER NAME: the Medicine Seller (actual name unknown... provided he has a name at all)
AGE: Unknown; confirmed to be at least a few hundred years old, and is quite likely much older
CANON: Mononoke
CANON POINT: immediately post-canon
FAMILY TYPES: Unknown: While not generally plagued by any uncertainty in his actions, the Medicine Seller is very much a neutral party in any interactions he's had with humans. While humans have a natural tendency to assume he is a force of "good" that will turn on them the moment they reveal their sins, he has flat out stated that it is not his place to judge them. He's about as True Neutral as you can get, really. Well, when measuring on an allignment scale meant for humans at any rate.
Deep Savers: No particular affiliation with water, but he's almost eerily calm at most times, and - contrary to how the lip makeup makes him appear - generally gives the impression of being rather serious. How gentle he tends to be varies depending on how kindly the person in question treats others. If the dead do not count, he could technically be considered a pacifist.
Nature Spirits: He fits the bill for calm and collected to a T, and - while not precisely being good - is at least certainly not evil.
APPEARANCE: Upon first noticing him, most people will notice his odd manner of dress before anything else. He's never without the purple headscarf that keeps what ash blond hair isn't falling into and framing his face off his neck. His outer robe (it's not a kimono) is predomninatly a rather lovely sky blue, and has a sort of swirl motif in purple and green on the sleeves and around the hip area, topped by yellow and blue concentric circles. Instead of wearing a simple belt or tucking it into his pants to keep it closed, he opted for a nice brown and gold obi. Said pants are simple black pants that end slightly below the knee. The geta he wears make him look a couple inches taller than he actually is.
Beyond the outfit, he rather sticks out among modern humans as well. For one, his ears are considerably larger and more pointed that any human's - elf-like, if you will. For another, he's rather pale, even by Northern European standards. For a third, he's tiny even by Edo Period standards - perhaps somewhere around 4'8"-4'9". Most strikingly perhaps, are facial features that are rather reminiscent of a fox, and the red markings around his eyes and along his nose as well as the purple paint on his upper lip that makes it look like he's constantly smirking only enhance the effect. While they're not terribly evident most of the time, he does have fangs. He also happens to be ridiculously pretty, to the point where near every woman that appears in his canon blushes when they first get a good look at him.
PERSONALITY:
The Medicine Seller is, to put it bluntly, a rather aloof creature. Even as the one in the place of what would traditionally be the role of the hero, he remains rather distinctly detached from the situations he's in; a point of unwavering calm when everyone else is understandably falling apart around him.
It's interesting to note that at one point, when he has his face turned into a mask by a mononoke, he was still able to move around and even eventually make the henohenomoheji he'd drawn on in the spot where his face should have been into his own face. He cites the reason for being able to do this as the character for "face" and "mask" as being one in the same, and that on that line of thinking allows him to accept any "face" as his own. While being a rather profound (if bizarre) statement, it is also a demonstration of part of the reason behind his tendency to be aloof, and of his true nature.
He's not human.
Granted, this is rather obvious to an outside viewer, although his claims of being a normal human fool those around him as they tend to ignore him the moment he declares himself a peddler. This would be mostly due to the merchant class - and peddlers in particular - being the bottom rung on the ladder that is the Edo period's social class system, and that out of the corner of someone's eye, he looks a bit like a woman. Again, a case of him taking a role to meet his own ends. In this particular instance, it is in fact to be largely regarded as part of the background so that people will speak freely of their own problems to the others involved without paying him mind; an essential task in carrying out his true purpose.
You see, his world is one that contains spirits of many types, although the two that are relevant to our protagonist here are the ayakashi, and - more importantly - the unnatural beings spawned from the union of strong negative human emotion and the ayakashi that attaches itself to those emotions. The name of this class of spirit: mononoke. The mononoke are something that simply should not exist, and as such, it is the Medicine Seller's duty to slay them and set their vengeful souls to rest. In short, to help restore balance to the world. To him, nothing particularly matters beyond that.
Given this dedication to his duty and his nature as a spirit of some form, he does not operate by the same set of morals that humans do. He doesn't particularly care when those who fail to follow his instructions when dealing with a mononoke are injured or killed, and is even perfectly willing to amuse himself at the expense of the trapped ghosts of people killed by a mononoke for the cited reason of it being a more entertaining way of accomplishing his task. Further compounding his somewhat alien way of viewing the world is his longevity - if not outright immortality - and having two entirely separate facets of his being. The side that interacts with the world at large is the Medicine Seller as we see him throughout most of the series; the other half can only appear when a mononoke's Shape, Truth, and Reason have been discovered and the sword released, and only this side can defeat mononoke. This is not to say that any of his intents are malicious; for the most part he tends towards benevolence, even doing his best to keep all humans caught up in a mononoke's need for vengeance no matter if they are an innocent caught in the crossfire or a murderer. He simply happens to view the world from a perspective that, when explained to a Western audience, is a bit more along the lines of fairies of the Seelie Court. This includes a tendency to lie - both to conceal his identity and his own amusement - and to chose words in very particular ways that mean he's giving a misleading truth or that he's hiding the real lie. In short, human morality is usually seen on a scale of Black, White, and a whole lot of grey area in between those two polarities, and the Medicine Seller is somewhere more on a line between a different set of colors entirely. He has a fairly good understanding of the rules of human morality; beyond a bit of crossover for particularly terrible crimes though, he doesn't seem to entirely get why many of these moral rules exist.
Beyond the morality spectrum difference, he does have other reasons to hunt mononoke, both of which become apparent during the Umibozu arc. Kayo notes that during the initial panic when it's discovered that the ship is trapped on the sea full of ayakashi, the Medicine Seller actually seems to be enjoying himself despite the very real danger they are all in of being killed in rather unpleasant ways. This same amusement shows up again in the Nue arc when it becomes rather apparent at the end that he could have slain the mononoke far sooner, but drew it out for his own amusement. Not long after this observation is made, a fish-shaped ayakashi appears that shows each person on the ship their greatest fear. When it gets to the Medicine Seller, he states that his fear is that there will be no truth, form, or regret at the end. Unlike the humans, he does not scream, cry, or show any sort of terror at the vision he is shown. If anything, he shows the same sort of solemn acceptance as his body vanishes that one who has seen their own end coming for so long that they have come to terms with the inevitable and made peace with it. This implies that without mononoke he may cease to exist, further implying that he quite literally exists solely for the purpose of setting their vengeful souls to rest. While most would think this would be good reason to be very serious most of the time - and he does take his task seriously in general - the actual reason he appears more serious in general is that he just doesn't care to change his expression from deadpan terribly much.
Due to not being bound by societal norms beyond the veneer he wears to keep people from becoming suspicious, he cares nothing about social status. To him, people are to be judged based on how they treat him and those around them. As such, even though he can be almost cruel and very much a cold fish to anyone who slights him or others around them, he is noticeably kinder to those who treat him and others with kindness. He is also more compassionate to those who have been wronged by others; due to the time period, this often means he is kinder to women than men, but it extends to animals and oftentimes the mononoke themselves. The most obvious examples of this are the way he is kindest of all to Kayo, the girl who was kind and helpful to him both times he met her, how he apologizes to the first Bakeneko for having to slay it (only in the manga version, which is more consistent with his characterization than his original appearance in Ayakashi), and how the softest expression he has in the entire series is when he's stroking the spirit of the cat that had been the second Bakeneko.
HISTORY: Little is known of what his life was like prior to canon. In fact, all that anyone can be certain of is that he did the same as he does throughout the series: locate and defeat the vengeful spirits known as mononoke.
The bulk of his history that canon lets us know about is at the Wikipedia page for the series. The only part that isn't covered there was covered in this series, which Mononoke is a spinoff of.
SAMPLES
FIRST PERSON:
Dear_Mun post and thread
THIRD PERSON:
It was raining again.
Along the side of the road, a simple rice cake lay in the wet grass. This far out of town and on a day like that day, such a small thing would have gone unnoticed and remain there forgotten until a passing animal decided to make a meal of it. ...Or at least this would have been so if a certain peddler had not been walking this road. The man stopped for a moment, staring intently at the food a hasty traveler not long before him must have dropped, before he casually retrieved it and moved on to the shelter of a roadside shrine.
He knew who this shrine was dedicated to, once. As more and more all but the greatest gods are forgotten, the small protectors like the fox who watched over this lonely stretch of road and himself are left to fend for themselves. Once upon a time, the more spiritually aware had been able to see them for what they really were when they weren't making the effort to hide themselves. Now he does not know if any but those who most believe can still see them...
The old fox was not there at the moment; perhaps he had long since moved on, or even left the world that had all but forgotten him behind. Still, he placed the damp rice cake where so many other offerings had gone in days past. A thank you for allowing him a place to wait out the worst of the rain... and a tribute to old memories.
"I do not know what has become of you, old friend... but I hope you are well, wherever you might be."
Important Definitions
Although it is never explicitly stated one way or the other whether or not the nameless manifestation (here referred to as the Other Self) is another spirit sharing the Medicine Seller's body or in fact a part of himself, it does appear that they are not entirely one and the same. This is evidenced most clearly in scenes where the two appear onscreen at the same time. ...It's difficult to explain, but the closest comparison would be someone with a secondary personality that only appears under certain conditions. Said conditions in this case are the discovery of a mononoke's Shape, Truth, and Reason: the pieces of the puzzle that allow the one who can wield the true form special sword meant to slay mononoke.
A mononoke is a general term for a monster. In the case of this show however, it is a specific class of monster born from an ayakashi latching onto the intense negative feelings of humans and transforming into a much more powerful sort of monster that warps reality around it. Because of this property, and how each mononoke seeks vengeance on those that caused the original human's lamentable fate, they must be slain. It is entirely possible for living people to become mononoke, although slaying the mononoke does not kill the human.
In mythology, an ayakashi is a specific class of monster that appears over and around water. While the majority of the spirits in the show do have to do with water, some do not appear to be, so it may be a slightly broader category of spirit here.
NAME: Endless
AGE: 23
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: N/A
IC Information
CHARACTER NAME: the Medicine Seller (actual name unknown... provided he has a name at all)
AGE: Unknown; confirmed to be at least a few hundred years old, and is quite likely much older
CANON: Mononoke
CANON POINT: immediately post-canon
FAMILY TYPES: Unknown: While not generally plagued by any uncertainty in his actions, the Medicine Seller is very much a neutral party in any interactions he's had with humans. While humans have a natural tendency to assume he is a force of "good" that will turn on them the moment they reveal their sins, he has flat out stated that it is not his place to judge them. He's about as True Neutral as you can get, really. Well, when measuring on an allignment scale meant for humans at any rate.
Deep Savers: No particular affiliation with water, but he's almost eerily calm at most times, and - contrary to how the lip makeup makes him appear - generally gives the impression of being rather serious. How gentle he tends to be varies depending on how kindly the person in question treats others. If the dead do not count, he could technically be considered a pacifist.
Nature Spirits: He fits the bill for calm and collected to a T, and - while not precisely being good - is at least certainly not evil.
APPEARANCE: Upon first noticing him, most people will notice his odd manner of dress before anything else. He's never without the purple headscarf that keeps what ash blond hair isn't falling into and framing his face off his neck. His outer robe (it's not a kimono) is predomninatly a rather lovely sky blue, and has a sort of swirl motif in purple and green on the sleeves and around the hip area, topped by yellow and blue concentric circles. Instead of wearing a simple belt or tucking it into his pants to keep it closed, he opted for a nice brown and gold obi. Said pants are simple black pants that end slightly below the knee. The geta he wears make him look a couple inches taller than he actually is.
Beyond the outfit, he rather sticks out among modern humans as well. For one, his ears are considerably larger and more pointed that any human's - elf-like, if you will. For another, he's rather pale, even by Northern European standards. For a third, he's tiny even by Edo Period standards - perhaps somewhere around 4'8"-4'9". Most strikingly perhaps, are facial features that are rather reminiscent of a fox, and the red markings around his eyes and along his nose as well as the purple paint on his upper lip that makes it look like he's constantly smirking only enhance the effect. While they're not terribly evident most of the time, he does have fangs. He also happens to be ridiculously pretty, to the point where near every woman that appears in his canon blushes when they first get a good look at him.
PERSONALITY:
The Medicine Seller is, to put it bluntly, a rather aloof creature. Even as the one in the place of what would traditionally be the role of the hero, he remains rather distinctly detached from the situations he's in; a point of unwavering calm when everyone else is understandably falling apart around him.
It's interesting to note that at one point, when he has his face turned into a mask by a mononoke, he was still able to move around and even eventually make the henohenomoheji he'd drawn on in the spot where his face should have been into his own face. He cites the reason for being able to do this as the character for "face" and "mask" as being one in the same, and that on that line of thinking allows him to accept any "face" as his own. While being a rather profound (if bizarre) statement, it is also a demonstration of part of the reason behind his tendency to be aloof, and of his true nature.
He's not human.
Granted, this is rather obvious to an outside viewer, although his claims of being a normal human fool those around him as they tend to ignore him the moment he declares himself a peddler. This would be mostly due to the merchant class - and peddlers in particular - being the bottom rung on the ladder that is the Edo period's social class system, and that out of the corner of someone's eye, he looks a bit like a woman. Again, a case of him taking a role to meet his own ends. In this particular instance, it is in fact to be largely regarded as part of the background so that people will speak freely of their own problems to the others involved without paying him mind; an essential task in carrying out his true purpose.
You see, his world is one that contains spirits of many types, although the two that are relevant to our protagonist here are the ayakashi, and - more importantly - the unnatural beings spawned from the union of strong negative human emotion and the ayakashi that attaches itself to those emotions. The name of this class of spirit: mononoke. The mononoke are something that simply should not exist, and as such, it is the Medicine Seller's duty to slay them and set their vengeful souls to rest. In short, to help restore balance to the world. To him, nothing particularly matters beyond that.
Given this dedication to his duty and his nature as a spirit of some form, he does not operate by the same set of morals that humans do. He doesn't particularly care when those who fail to follow his instructions when dealing with a mononoke are injured or killed, and is even perfectly willing to amuse himself at the expense of the trapped ghosts of people killed by a mononoke for the cited reason of it being a more entertaining way of accomplishing his task. Further compounding his somewhat alien way of viewing the world is his longevity - if not outright immortality - and having two entirely separate facets of his being. The side that interacts with the world at large is the Medicine Seller as we see him throughout most of the series; the other half can only appear when a mononoke's Shape, Truth, and Reason have been discovered and the sword released, and only this side can defeat mononoke. This is not to say that any of his intents are malicious; for the most part he tends towards benevolence, even doing his best to keep all humans caught up in a mononoke's need for vengeance no matter if they are an innocent caught in the crossfire or a murderer. He simply happens to view the world from a perspective that, when explained to a Western audience, is a bit more along the lines of fairies of the Seelie Court. This includes a tendency to lie - both to conceal his identity and his own amusement - and to chose words in very particular ways that mean he's giving a misleading truth or that he's hiding the real lie. In short, human morality is usually seen on a scale of Black, White, and a whole lot of grey area in between those two polarities, and the Medicine Seller is somewhere more on a line between a different set of colors entirely. He has a fairly good understanding of the rules of human morality; beyond a bit of crossover for particularly terrible crimes though, he doesn't seem to entirely get why many of these moral rules exist.
Beyond the morality spectrum difference, he does have other reasons to hunt mononoke, both of which become apparent during the Umibozu arc. Kayo notes that during the initial panic when it's discovered that the ship is trapped on the sea full of ayakashi, the Medicine Seller actually seems to be enjoying himself despite the very real danger they are all in of being killed in rather unpleasant ways. This same amusement shows up again in the Nue arc when it becomes rather apparent at the end that he could have slain the mononoke far sooner, but drew it out for his own amusement. Not long after this observation is made, a fish-shaped ayakashi appears that shows each person on the ship their greatest fear. When it gets to the Medicine Seller, he states that his fear is that there will be no truth, form, or regret at the end. Unlike the humans, he does not scream, cry, or show any sort of terror at the vision he is shown. If anything, he shows the same sort of solemn acceptance as his body vanishes that one who has seen their own end coming for so long that they have come to terms with the inevitable and made peace with it. This implies that without mononoke he may cease to exist, further implying that he quite literally exists solely for the purpose of setting their vengeful souls to rest. While most would think this would be good reason to be very serious most of the time - and he does take his task seriously in general - the actual reason he appears more serious in general is that he just doesn't care to change his expression from deadpan terribly much.
Due to not being bound by societal norms beyond the veneer he wears to keep people from becoming suspicious, he cares nothing about social status. To him, people are to be judged based on how they treat him and those around them. As such, even though he can be almost cruel and very much a cold fish to anyone who slights him or others around them, he is noticeably kinder to those who treat him and others with kindness. He is also more compassionate to those who have been wronged by others; due to the time period, this often means he is kinder to women than men, but it extends to animals and oftentimes the mononoke themselves. The most obvious examples of this are the way he is kindest of all to Kayo, the girl who was kind and helpful to him both times he met her, how he apologizes to the first Bakeneko for having to slay it (only in the manga version, which is more consistent with his characterization than his original appearance in Ayakashi), and how the softest expression he has in the entire series is when he's stroking the spirit of the cat that had been the second Bakeneko.
HISTORY: Little is known of what his life was like prior to canon. In fact, all that anyone can be certain of is that he did the same as he does throughout the series: locate and defeat the vengeful spirits known as mononoke.
The bulk of his history that canon lets us know about is at the Wikipedia page for the series. The only part that isn't covered there was covered in this series, which Mononoke is a spinoff of.
SAMPLES
FIRST PERSON:
Dear_Mun post and thread
THIRD PERSON:
It was raining again.
Along the side of the road, a simple rice cake lay in the wet grass. This far out of town and on a day like that day, such a small thing would have gone unnoticed and remain there forgotten until a passing animal decided to make a meal of it. ...Or at least this would have been so if a certain peddler had not been walking this road. The man stopped for a moment, staring intently at the food a hasty traveler not long before him must have dropped, before he casually retrieved it and moved on to the shelter of a roadside shrine.
He knew who this shrine was dedicated to, once. As more and more all but the greatest gods are forgotten, the small protectors like the fox who watched over this lonely stretch of road and himself are left to fend for themselves. Once upon a time, the more spiritually aware had been able to see them for what they really were when they weren't making the effort to hide themselves. Now he does not know if any but those who most believe can still see them...
The old fox was not there at the moment; perhaps he had long since moved on, or even left the world that had all but forgotten him behind. Still, he placed the damp rice cake where so many other offerings had gone in days past. A thank you for allowing him a place to wait out the worst of the rain... and a tribute to old memories.
"I do not know what has become of you, old friend... but I hope you are well, wherever you might be."
Important Definitions
Although it is never explicitly stated one way or the other whether or not the nameless manifestation (here referred to as the Other Self) is another spirit sharing the Medicine Seller's body or in fact a part of himself, it does appear that they are not entirely one and the same. This is evidenced most clearly in scenes where the two appear onscreen at the same time. ...It's difficult to explain, but the closest comparison would be someone with a secondary personality that only appears under certain conditions. Said conditions in this case are the discovery of a mononoke's Shape, Truth, and Reason: the pieces of the puzzle that allow the one who can wield the true form special sword meant to slay mononoke.
A mononoke is a general term for a monster. In the case of this show however, it is a specific class of monster born from an ayakashi latching onto the intense negative feelings of humans and transforming into a much more powerful sort of monster that warps reality around it. Because of this property, and how each mononoke seeks vengeance on those that caused the original human's lamentable fate, they must be slain. It is entirely possible for living people to become mononoke, although slaying the mononoke does not kill the human.
In mythology, an ayakashi is a specific class of monster that appears over and around water. While the majority of the spirits in the show do have to do with water, some do not appear to be, so it may be a slightly broader category of spirit here.
